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News of Toys R Us going out of business is everywhere. It's getting more press than some much more deserving world affairs stories. Why? Because Toys R Us has meant so much to so many of us that watching it die feels like losing an old friend.

But that's the thing. Something that loved doesn't just die that easily. Or at least not for long.

The Toys R Us we all know and love is dead. But I expect to see a new, reinvented incarnation of Toys R Us make a Hostess-style comeback within the next few years. And it just might be as an Amazon brand. How could this happen, and why? Let's think it through...

Why Is Toys R Us Dying?

The first assumption most people have is that Toys R Us just couldn't compete. With Amazon dominating online sales, Target and Walmart taking over a large part of the brick and mortar toy business, and video games and apps lowering the demand for toys in general, Toys R us was doomed. Right? Well, no. They still controlled about 15% of the toy market, and had an extremely well loved brand. They very easily could have restructured their business a bit and had a strong business for decades to come.

No, what killed them was corporate takeover shenanigans. In 2005, Toys R Us was a publicly traded company, until Bain Capital, KKR & Co., and Vornado Realty Trust combined their efforts to buy out the company and take it private. They bought the company for $6.6 billion, but only put in $1.3 billion of their own money. The remaining $5.3 billion they borrowed. Which meant the newly private Toys R Us now had $5.3B in debt forced onto their books. And to add insult to injury, they spun off a new company called Toys R Us Property Company, which then owned all of the real estate, which it leased back to the main company.

Now, in addition to having to make enough profit to keep their business running, Toys R Us had to pay $400 million dollars every year, just on payments and interest on that insane $5.3B debt. Even in good times, that would have been an extremely hard burden to manage. Add in the competition and weakening demand for toys, and it's a recipe for disaster.

What Happens Next?

So here we are. Bankruptcy couldn't save them, so Toys R Us is closing their doors for good, laying off 30,000 employees, and liquidating their assets. But that's where things get interesting. Yes, they're liquidating their inventory, too. But the one asset they have to liquidate that could be a game changer is their brand name and intellectual property.

We've seen this before. In 2009, after 79 years, Hostess went out of business, taking their beloved cupcakes and Twinkies off the market "for good." But then, in 2013, the Hostess brand and IP were sold to another company, who restarted the business and brought those beloved snack cakes back to the shelves. And now people barely remember that Hostess was ever gone at all.

So who's going to buy the Toys R Us brand and IP? My money is on Amazon. They're the kings of retail, they're innovative enough to be able to reimagine the business model for the 21st century, and they already understand Toys R Us's business pretty well, after being the online presence for Toys R Us for a few years, back at the turn of the century.

Who else might be interested? Walmart? Target? Some random holding company none of us have heard of? Maybe. Hasbro, after they acquire Mattel and secure a near monopoly on toy manufacturing? Also plausible. Though I'm not sure any of them have both the retail expertise and the innovative spirit needed to really pull off a Toys R Us reinvention.

But rest assured, someone is going to buy the Toys R Us brand and IP, and they won be buying it just for the fun of it.

What Would Amazon's Toys R Us Look Like?

If Amazon buys the Toys R Us brand, they're not going to reopen the stores as they were. Those locations will have been sold off, leased to other retailers, or (like many old Mervyn's lots) turned into condos by then. And Amazon doesn't want to run an exact copy of the old Toys R Us any more than they want to own an exact copy of Barnes & Noble. They'll go back to the basics, dig in to the first principles of the toy business, and reimagine it from scratch.

What do you remember about Toys R Us? I mean, what memories do you have that really resonate and make you feel like a kid again? For me, it's the Star Wars aisle. Or the Transformers aisle. For you it might be Barbie, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Elmo, bikes, board games, or some other aisle that was overflowing with That One Thing you just couldn't get enough of. And they had more than enough of it. More than you had any idea even existed.

Toys R Us, at its best, was the purest form of showcase merchandising. Take any kid, find out what they love, and chances are there was an aisle that they could spend all day. Even if we couldn't afford to buy anything, just seeing everything that existed, dreaming about what we wanted, and silently writing up that xmas or birthday list in our head could keep us entertained for hours.

Target and Walmart do their best to replicate that on a smaller scale, but it's just not the same. And online retail has always excelled in search-based shopping and sucked at browsing. There's a huge opportunity for someone to crack that nut and build a destination site where any kid who loves That One Thing can go to see every toy, book, poster, and toothbrush that exists with That Thing on it. Give kids the awe-inspiring browsing experience online they had at Toys R Us, and you'll have a great business. Give parents and others who want to buy gifts for those kids a way to tap into that kid's ultimate wishlist (with proper parental grooming), and feed their "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas back to the toy makers and entertainment companies, and you’ll have something truly special on your hands.

Anyone who buys the Toys R Us brand could build something like this. But just as Best Buy is learning, their business would be hampered by shoppers using their stores for showcasing, to decide what they want to buy, then going online to get it cheaper off Amazon. For Amazon, of course, that wouldn't be an issue.

And as we're seeing with Amazon's experiments in brick and mortar book stores, there's a very good chance they'd eventually start to open brick and mortar Toys R Us locations as well. They wouldn't look like the old Toys R Us. But they'd serve the same ultimate purpose of giving kids all over a place that they'll beg their folks to bring them on the weekend, so they can revel in the bliss that "I want ALL THE THINGS!!" feeling.

Mark my words. A few years from now, we'll see a new incarnation of Toys R Us launch, from the new owner of the brand. They'll keep the giraffe and the vibrant colors, but re-imagine it for how toy sales should be in the 21st century. And more likely than not, the new Toys R us will be an Amazon brand.

(If anyone has Jeff Bezos on speed dial, please let him know that I would LOVE to help him reinvent this new business. Let's Mary Ellen Carter the shit out of this!!)

On 31 August 2017, eBay's fixed-price marketplace site Half.com will be closing its doors for good. This makes me a little sad, and a lot nostalgic. This site did so much for me over the years, and I tried to do so much for it. It's sad to see it go.

So why am I so emotionally attached to a website? Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, when a cable TV subscription was still way out of my budget and before I had heard of Netflix (circa 2000), I used to watch all my TV shows and movies on DVD. I'd wait a year for my shows to come out on DVD, buy them used, and then sell them used. Half.com made the buying and selling insanely easy and I loved the crap out of the site as a user.

A few years later, as the first dot-com bust left me unemployed and a bit desperate for a while, I was able to use Half.com to sell every DVD, book, and CD I owned in order to pay rent for a month or two. With the huge difference is listing speed, this would have been completely uneconomical to do on eBay. I probably would have had to move back to Sacramento with my tail between my legs and would never have found the wonderful career I enjoy today. This was just the first time Half.com saved my career.

In 2003, eBay announced that it was going to close down Half.com some time in the next year. They apparently saw it as a duplicate of existing eBay functionality. I thought they were completely nuts. After a few weeks of going through the Five Stages of Grief over the news, I finally arrived at Stage 6: Defiance. I could accept that it was going away. But that didn't mean its heart had to die with it.

Ok, sure. eBay didn't realize what a gold mine they were sitting on with Half.com. They didn't recognize the power that a catalog-based marketplace could bring. But I did. And I was unemployed, scrappy, and passionate. So why shouldn't I start working on a business plan to build a new solution that took the best lessons from Half.com and built upon them to create something that could bring to life the unrealized potential of a catalog based marketplace.

That obsession of endless research and brainstorming lasted until spring of 2004, when my unemployment was interrupted by a wonderful new job. At eBay. Having been a eBay user since 1999, this was a dream come true (thanks Mike!). And that dream got even better later that year, when eBay decided not to close Half.com after all and I got assigned as one of the lead front end developers on the project to rebuild the entire Half.com site from scratch on eBay's platform.

Apparently, despite eBay's best efforts to duplicate Half.com functionality on eBay and drive users over to the main marketplace, the revenue from textbook sales and intensely loyal Half.com users was enough to justify keeping the site alive. That conversion project was the biggest project I had taken on as a web developer, and was some of the most fulfilling work I've ever done. It was my own personal Mary Ellen Carter.

This was also the project that first got me interested in becoming a product manager, and where I got to write my very first PRD (Product Requirements Document) for the content management system that runs Half's merchandising pages. Without my manager Rashid supporting my interest in switching sides, and Valerie's endless patience in mentoring me in the ways of Product, I'm not sure I would have known how to make the transition from dev to product.

As a self-taught developer who hadn't even had an email address until I was 23, I was never going to be the best coder in the room, next to kids who had been immersed in the internet since high school or college. But understanding the frustrations that normal non-technical people have with technology and finding ways to make that less painful while building a sustainable business? That I could build a career on. Which makes this the second time Half.com saved my career.

Unfortunately, the cost/benefit analysis that made Half worth keeping alive to eBay's management didn't translate to an appreciation of the potential of a catalog-based marketplace. I pitched the idea again and again while I was there and got only lukewarm reception from the Powers That Be. But I never really stopped thinking about that dusty old business plan I had started when they first threatened to close down Half.com.

Thirteen years later, eBay still hasn't done anything significant in the catalog-based marketplace space. They've created catalogs that they use on the back end to make the listing process easier. But the user experience is still all about finding items, not products, which eliminates most of the potential benefits of catalogs. And so, third party marketplaces like BrickLink (Lego bricks and sets), TCGPlayer (Magic and other collectible card games), and others are dominating their niche categories, while eBay continues to concentrate only on the horizontal “you can sell anything pretty well” model, rather than diving into the vertical “you can sell this one kind of thing extremely well” model. And the collectibles market really doesn't look that much different than it did in 2000.

eBay's investment in Half.com, in the past decade, has been effectively close to zero. CSS positioning wasn't quite reliable enough for production when we did that initial rebuild project, so we temporarily used an insane mess of nested tables for the layout, with plans to replace it with CSS later. The "temporary" code I wrote in 2004 will still be 99% the same when the doors close for good next week. Including my lucky charm <!--Keep Flying--> HTML comment at the bottom of the source code.

Now here we are. eBay has announced that it is closing Half.com. Again. This time I'm sad, but not upset. If they haven't taken Half.com seriously in the past decade, maybe it's time to let it go. And hopefully there's someone else out there, just as passionate about catalog-based marketplaces as I am, who will take the opportunity to finally do something about it.

And, if no one has done so by the time my kids are a bit older and my adventures in Fintech have reached their peak, perhaps I'll dust off that old business plan and give it a go myself.

Nintendo has announced that they are discontinuing the NES Classic, the $60 miniature game system with 30 of Nintendo's best 80s era games, which has been going for $200+ on eBay (much higher when it first came out). This has a lot of would-be buyers pretty pissed off. I'm here to tell you why this might actually be a good thing.

TL;DR: NES Classic proved demand for classic games, and could be the catalyst for finally getting them as digital downloads for the Nintendo Switch, and possibly Apple TV.

Why The NES Classic Exists

The fact that the NES Classic exists at all is either a market test or (I think much more likely) an accident of timing. Either way, the fact that the demand was so much higher than the supply (ie, their expecte demand) that it will likely lead to bigger and better things in the near future. Follow my logic on this...

Last year, Nintendo was hard at work trying to put the finishing touches on their new flagship gaming system, the Nintendo Switch. By summer, it was becoming increasingly clear that they were not going to be able to meet the obvious "on shelves by Black Friday" launch target. I do not envy the product manager who had to break it to the Nintendo execs that the Switch wouldn't be ready to launch until March!

That left Nintendo with a whole holiday season of nothing on the shelves, nothing to talk about in the media, and a whole lot of tech journalists speculating on what ever happened to the new Nintendo flagship system that had been rumored. At that point, the best thing they could hope for would be some other Nintendo product that would take very little time to get to market, but would keep the fans and media busy, while they devoted all their resources to getting the Switch out the door.

Game systems that put a bunch of old-school games onto a nostalgic piece of miniature hardware are nothing new. Atari released a series of Atari 2600 style controllers with classic games built into them in 2003, followed by a series of "Atari Flashback" retro consoles over the next 8 years. I haven't been able to find sales numbers for these, but they don't appear to have been a major cash cow. When they were initially released, I remember a few weeks of "oh, that's cool!" reactions from folks, but no big rush to buy them. They were just another nifty thing to see on ThinkGeek, and something you currently see stacks of in the discount aisle at Staples.

You can bet that there have been no shortage of manufacturers pitching Nintendo on making a similar product with their games. But whether due to the poor sales of the Atari versions or Nintendo's infamous protectiveness over their classic games, no Nintendo version of this had yet been approved.

So there they are, in the summer of 2016. They just found out Switch won't be ready in time for the holidays. And their execs are probably fuming mad about it. Then some enterprising product manager pipes up. "What about that miniature NES system they were pitching to us years ago? Sure, it won't sell a lot of systems. But it will give the fans and the press something fun to chew on while we concentrate on the Switch. We already have the prototype the manufacturer used to pitch it to us. Give me what we expected to spend on marketing the Switch in Q4, and I can get 50,000 of these on the shelf for the holidays. PR problem solved." If this happened the way I imagine it did, I hope that person got one hell of a bonus.

Proving Demand For Classic Game Titles

Of course, Atari isn't Nintendo. People still love Atari games out of nostalgia. But most of their games just don't retain their value over the decades. But Nintendo games do. Even the games from the first generatio NES system are still incredibly fun to play today. And the characters franchises they launched are still popular in today's games, so there's the added pull of kids who grew up on Mari Cart and the much fancier Zelda games to want to go back and see where they started.

If they set their production numbers low because they expected Atari-level sales, you can imagine how pleased they would have been from the actual demand. They sold 196,000 units in the first month, and 1.5 million by the end of 2016. But all of their resources were dedicated to getting their new flagship Nintendo Switch ready for the March 2017 launch date. Any product managers or supply chain managers who might have been able to address the NES Classic supply problem were too busy with the Switch to do anything about it. If anything, they now had even more incentive to make sure the supply for the Switch would meet their now-inflated demand estimates. It just wouldn't have made any sense to spend any more time than necessary on the stop-gap stunt, no matter how high the demand.

Discontinuing the NES Classic

The the Switch launched. They sold 2 million units in the first month, making it the fastest selling system they've ever made. And, more relevant to our speculation here, a lot of product management resources are now free to start thinking about something other than Switch. With an Apple partnership on the table, a new flagship game system on the market, and newfound appreciation for how high the demand for the classic Nintendo games are, what comes next?

Continuing to sell the NES Classic beside the Nintendo Switch would make no sense. They would be competing for shelf space and supply chain resources, it would be confusing to consumers, and they'd be limited to only monetizing those ~30 games that are burnt into the hardware of the Classic. Nope. Anyone with half a bit of sense can see pretty quickly that the NES Classic, as it exists now, absolutely needs to be retired, and take its place as a fun footnote in Nintendo's history.

Paving The Way for Digital Downloads

BUT the thing most people love about the NES Classic isn't its hardware. It's the fact that they have a sleek, easy, (and legal) way to play their favorite classic games. And the fact that the NES Classic was as popular as it was will mostly likely give us far more of that than the NES Classic itself possibly could have.

People are currently willing to pau $200 for 30 NES games on the open market. Nintendo only sees $60 of that. That's before taking out the cost of manufacturing, distribution, etc. And that's limited to 30 games from their archive. Clearly, there's a lot of money being left on the table.

The day the new Apple TV was released, with its wireless game controller, I said that I'd kill to be able to buy individual classic Nintendo games (and a NES style controller) from the Apple App Store. Price the headline titles at $5 and the less popular ones at $2 and they'd fly off the virtual shelves. And with Nintendo's new partnership with Apple, this is undoubtedly what Apple is hoping for. But, of course, that would mean Nintendo giving Apple 30% of the revenue that gold rush would generate. So it's a great solution for consumers, but not so much for Nintendo.

Ahh, but now they have their own brand new flagship console. Forget the Apple TV. Now there really isn't any reason not to build their own version of the app store, sell the classic games directly to the Switch owners, and not only keep the whole revenue gold rush from the games, but use it as an additional feature to push sales of the Switch itself.

This isn't a feature you'd want to include at launch. If you know there's already going to be a high enough demand that you'll be struggling to meet supply, you hold off on this. Let the hardcore gamers hankering for their new Zelda game get the first batch. The following holiday season, when supply has caught up, demand is tapering off, and you've had time to QA the living hell out of your new app store, that's when you make every 80s era gamer's dreams come true and release the back catalog for digital download (slowly, over time, so there’s always something new to pick up).

Then you wait about six months. By then, the majority of people who would be willing to buy a new game system just for access to the classic games have had a chance to buy a Switch, fill their library with their favorite games, and get locked into your higher-margin platform. That's when you put them up in the Apple App Store as well, to extend the reach to the wider audience of people who aren't willing to buy a separate game system, but would be more than happy to buy the games for their existing Apple TV.

This is what I expect is going through Nintendo product managers' minds. I really, really hope I'm right. The time is ripe for Nintendo to open up their back catalog and kick of a resurgence of Nintendo fanaticism.

With the roll-out of the iPhone 6S and Apple's introduction of their iPhone Upgrade Program, there has been some confusion about what the iPhone Upgrade Program really means, and what the best way to buy an iPhone really is. Here, I attempt to clarify the former, and crunch the numbers on the latter.

iPhone Upgrade Program

Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program is for people who want to get the newest iPhone every year, at a predictable cost. You pay $32/month ($384/year) for the latest iPhone base model (or $37-45/month for upgraded models), which includes AppleCare+, and every year you can upgrade to the latest, greatest iPhone.

The thing that is confusing a lot of people is that this is technically a 24 month contract. But it has a "give back the phone and start over" option that kicks in at 12 months. After paying on your phone for a year, you have the choice of keeping your old phone, completing the 2 year contract, and then owning it, or giving back the phone, getting a brand new one, and starting over with a new phone and a new 24 month contact.

So if you buy an iPhone 6S today, you'd pay $384 over the next 12 months. Then, if you're not impressed with anything in the iPhone 7, you could keep your 6S, pay another $384 over the next 12 months, and then own your 6S outright by the time the 7S comes out. Or, after that first 12 months, you can give your iPhone 6S back, get an iPhone 7, and start a new 24 month contact, leaving you with the same "keep it or trade it in" decision when the 7S comes out.

This is very similar to how many of the carrier payment plans (like AT&T Next) work, except that carrier plans can be spread out over 20, 24, or 30 months, with varying upgrade timelines. The main value difference between Apple's plan and the carrier plans is that Apple's comes with AppleCare+ included in the price.

Total Cost / Benefit Of Different Buying Options

When we consider what the "best" way to buy a phone is, we're really looking at the total cost of ownership of the phone, balanced against the total benefit we get from the phone. The benefit we each get from always having the latest phone versus a slightly older phone is hard to quantify, and will likely change year to year based on what new features are introduced. But it's pretty easy to quantify the cost of ownership, so we'll start there. And once we know the cost of ownership difference, it should make the yearly decision of whether or not to upgrade much simpler.

Total cost of ownership of an iPhone (or anything else) includes the total amount you've paid to own it, minus the amount you can sell it for when you're done owning it. The table below shows the total yearly cost of ownership, averaged over a 4 year period, for each of the different buying options, three trade-in frequencies, and for each type of iPhone (entry-level 16GB, mid-level 64GB, and upper-level 128GB). Note that there are two versions of "Buy Cash," the first assuming you sell the phone for full market value, the second assuming you sell it to Gazelle or another convenient buy-back option for less than full market value.

Scroll to the end of the post if you want to see how I did the math.

TLDR Summary

If you plan to upgrade every year OR plan to get AppleCare+, Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program is the best way to go.

If you plan to upgrade every other year, and aren't interested in AppleCare+, you save about $60/year over Apple's plan by going with a 2-year payment plan from AT&T or Verizon (or ~$30/year savings if you upgrade every 4 years). This is probably where most people fall.

Buying cash only makes sense if you plan to upgrade every year, or plan to always stay a model or two behind. But even then, it's the highest-hassle option, and any savings can quickly disappear if you don't get a good price when selling your used phones.

Subsidized plans are a horrible idea. Almost no one should use them.

Which iPhone Should You Purchase?

Obviously, most of the decision on which specific model you want to buy will be dependent upon how you use your phone, what size screen you like, and which colors you prefer. But looking at the data here should give you a much better idea of how much extra per year you'd actually be paying for different memory options. Even though the purchase price of the phone is a $100 difference between each memory level, after accounting for resale value and how often you upgrade, the per-year average is actually much smaller.

Upgrading from 16GB to 64GB is a pretty consistent ~$50/year cost if you upgrade every year, ~$38 if you upgrade every other year, or ~$19 if you upgrade every 4 years. Upgrading from 64GB to 128GB is a about the same price difference for a slightly larger data increase, but only useful to a smaller set of users. Considering the pain of running out of room and having to delete things if you take a lot of photos or use a lot of apps, the upgrade to 64GB will probably make a lot of sense for most people. The folks for whom the 128GB upgrade makes sense probably already know who they are.

Which iPhone Payment Plan Should You Use?

To help you make sense of all the numbers in the table, I'll summarize how each of the payment options works, and who which one is most likely to be the best option for which kinds of users.

Cash Upfront
The most straight-forward way to buy an iPhone is to pay the full cost of the phone every time you buy one. No carrier subsidies, no payment plans, just plop the whole $650-850 on a credit card and it's yours to do with as you please. If you don't upgrade every year, this ends up costing the same as most of the carrier payment plans. It can also be the least expensive yearly cost of ownership option, with two significant caveats.

Obviously, the first caveat is that you need to be financially well-off enough that you can devote that much money toward a phone purchase, not only when you initially buy the phone, but also every time you upgrade, as you'll need to buy your new phone and transfer your data before you can turn around and resell the old phone to recoup part of the cost.

The second caveat is that the cost savings from this method is dependent upon getting a fair market value each time you resell your old phone to upgrade to the new one. If you're an ace at selling used phones on Craigslist or eBay, this option can save you quite a bit over most of the other options. But if you rely on buy-back programs like the ones provided by the carriers, or on sites like Gazelle.com, at far below market value, this actually becomes the most expensive option.

Who should buy this way?If you plan to upgrade every year, you don't plan to get AppleCare+, you're good at reselling your old phones, don't mind that extra hassle, and you have enough of a financial cushion to afford the buy-in price, this can be the cheapest way to buy your iPhones. If any of the above don't apply to you, this option probably isn't worth the hassle.

Subsidized Carrier Plan
While most people couldn't tell you what a "subsidized carrier plan" is, this is actually how most of us have bought our iPhones in the past. The carriers give us an unnaturally low price on the phone, lock us into a 2-year contract, and inflate our monthly bill enough to make back the difference over time. For AT&T, the difference between a subsidized and unsubsidized plan is $25/month. So your $200 subsidized iPhone actually costs you $800 over the two years of your contract, significantly higher than the $650 it would have cost you to buy it unsubsidized.

Even worse, most carriers don't even drop your phone bill back to its normal level, even after your 2 year contact ends. So if you think you're saving money by keeping your $200 subsidized phone for 4 years, you may be woefully mistaken.

Who should buy this way?This is the most expensive way to buy an iPhone. It is also the least flexible, as you're stuck in a 2-year contract without the option to upgrade if a really amazing new phone hits the market while you're in the middle of a contact. Almost no one should buy their phone this way.

Fortunately, most of the major carriers are starting to phase out subsidized phone plans, in favor of payment plans. (More on those next.) What I haven't been able to determine yet is why carriers don't seem to like the confusing subsidized plans that appear to be cheaper to those not in the know, but end up making them more money in the long run. If anyone knows, I'd love to understand their thinking better.

Carrier Payment Plan
Carriers are moving away from subsidized plans, but they still want to provide a low cost way for people to buy in to a new iPhone. So most of them are offering payment plans, where you don't pay anything up front to purchase the phone, but instead pay the full purchase price in installments over 20-30 months. This gets you most of the benefits of the buy-it-cash method, but with lower up-front cost. But there are catches.

Verizon's plan breaks the cost of the phone into 24 equal payments. This makes it very similar to the Apple plan, but without the AppleCare+. However, Verizon does not offer the ability to upgrade mid-contract (yet), so there is no option for upgrading every year. (Note: I left the calculation for a 12-month upgrade in the chart just as a benchmark against Apple's plan, should Verizon eventually add this feature.)

The AT&T Next payment plan gets a little trickier. It does offer a 12 month upgrade option, but it breaks the cost of the phone into 20 payments rather than 24. This means you're paying 60% of the cost of the phone in the first year and the remaining 40% the second year. That doesn't make a difference if you're upgrading every other year, but it means you're paying an extra 10% of the purchase price of the phone every year if you're upgrading ever year. This eliminates most of the savings yearly upgraders would otherwise get over the Apple plan.

If you rely on lower-than-market-value buy-back options for selling your old phones, you do run the risk of carrier plans being a bit more expensive than what is shown in the table (which assumes selling it for market value). If you upgrade every year, you never have a phone to sell, so it's really only every other year (or longer) upgraders that this would be an issue for. This usually comes down to a difference of about $100 in sale price if you're upgrading every other year, or $50 if it's every 4 years (or an annual average difference of $50 or $12). So, seller beware.

Who should buy this way?
If you plan to upgrade every year, Verizon won't let you and AT&T's plan is only ~$20 less per year than Apple's plan, without the $130/year added value of AppleCare+. If you plan to upgrade every other year (or less often), and you don't plan to buy AppleCare+, a payment plan from AT&T or Verizon will save you ~$60/year over Apple's plan.

Note 1: Sprint & T-Mobile: I wasn't able to find reliable data on Sprint or T-Mobile's payment plans. If you get decent service form them in your area, you may want to crunch those numbers for yourself and see how they stack up. You can download my spreadsheet at the bottom of the post, to get you started.

Note 2: AT&T Unlimited: If you have an AT&T account that is grandfathered into unlimited data, and you use your phone even moderately, it's a really, really bad idea to sign up for ANY plan that will move you off of unlimited. If you have one of these plans, always buy your phone from an AT&T-owned AT&T store, NEVER from an AT&T Authorized Reseller. I've known WAY too many people who were straight up lied to by them, and they will often boot your off of Unlimited even if there was a way you could have stayed on it. Go to a real AT&T store and make double and triple sure that whatever payment plan you choose will not interfere with your unlimited account.

Note 3: For Bargain Shoppers: A few people pointed out that they do like to upgrade every year, but not to the newest model. Instead, they buy a 1-year old iPhone used every year, and sell their 2-year old used one to offset the cost. If you're good at selling used phones for fair market value, this comes out to about $200/year, definitely lower than any other option. If you rely on below-market-value trade-in options, it climbs to ~$300/year, more expensive than the carrier contracts that give you a brand new one every other year.

Apple Payment Plan
Apple's new iPhone Upgrade Plan is very similar to the payment plans provided by the carriers, but without the hidden tricks. The main differences are the simplicity of Apple's plan, and that AppleCare+ is included in the price.

AppleCare+ normally costs an additional $130 each time you buy a new phone, so this can be a pretty significant savings if you upgrade every year, or a modest savings if you upgrade less often. Apple's plan is also much simpler than the carrier plans, which is a plus all on its own.

Who should buy this way?If you plan to upgrade every year, or if you plan to buy AppleCare+ for your phone, Apple's iPhone Upgrade Plan is currently the best way to go. It gives you the best value for your dollar, as well as the simplest plan.

I hope this helps clarify things and give you a better idea of which option might be best for you.

For those who want to see how I did my math, and potentially help me spot any errors I might have made, feel free to keep reading...

I'm ready to find the next big step in my career. Somewhere out there is a company with complex, user-centric problems they desperately need someone to fix, and I'm that guy. Now I just need the help of my friends and colleagues in introducing me to my new coworkers. Let the matchmaking begin!

What do I do?

I'm a product manager. Different companies use different titles for this, but I'm the guy who works with the business unit, customer support, development, design, etc, and defines a plan on how to meet whatever business objective we're shooting for.

I have also done a fair share of project management (coordinating with developers, designers, etc, to execute on a plan that has already been defined), community management, tech writing, and web development. While I'd prefer not to go back to doing any of these full time, I'm more than happy to find a product management position that lets me dabble in these a bit as part of the job.

I am at my best when I'm working on consumer-facing products. Business-to-business would be my next choice, with enterprise coming in lower on the list. I love knowing that what I'm building will be used by millions of people and make their every day lives better, in some way. Give me something I can believe in, and I'll work my ass off for it without ever feeling winded.

As a student of economics, I believe that incentives have a more direct correlation to behavior than good intentions. I'm not interested in any environment where the product and the business model don't share the same incentives. Give me a company that makes their money providing something useful to the world and I'll be a happy camper.

I have worked for startups, giant corporations, and agencies. I'm open to anything from a small to large company or agency, as long as it has a healthy work-life balance and treats employees like an asset to invest in rather than as a resource to burn through.

I live in Fremont, and would like to keep my commute down to about 45 minutes. East Bay would be ideal. Somewhere between San Jose and Mountain View would be great. I'd be willing to commute to the city, if it's a great company and close to BART.

Any help you guys can lend in helping me figure out where my next I want to spend my next decade would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

One year ago tonight, little miss Tesla Fae entered the world, and my life will never be the same.

There are dozens of events that can "change your life forever." The party you went to where you met the friends you spend the next few decades relying on. The job you took that defines the direction of the rest of your career. Meeting the amazing woman you're lucky enough to eventually marry. But all of these are events that mainly impact you and how you travel your own path.

Having a child is different. Suddenly, I'm not just responsible for myself. There's this whole new person in the world who wouldn't be here without me. And it's my job to help her make sense of all this craziness, and find her own path through the woods. It's exciting, and inspiring, and terrifying.

I feel like we lucked out with Tesla. She has been a source of pure joy, since the moment she was born. She's always happy, always inquisitive, and always an inspiration. Her bouts of anger only last a moment, and then she bounces back to the bright-eyed explorer we've come to know. As her mom said today, we're learning as much from Tesla as she's learning from us. She's already an amazing person, and I can't wait to see who she becomes.

With great children comes great responsibility. I know the most important responsibility I have in the coming years will be giving Tesla the support and guidance she'll need to become who and what she wants to be. I know I'll make mistakes, and I still have a lot of learning and becoming of my own to do. But I'd like to make a few promises to her (and any siblings she may later have), that I will always strive to uphold.

I promise to give you a stable, supportive childhood, so you'll always feel safe to explore the world around you, as well as the world within you. I will do everything I can to shield you from the kinds of insecurities that slowed me down, including working my hardest to shed the ones I still cling to, so you have as positive a role model as possible. And I will do everything I can to help you find and follow your own passions.

I promise to surround you with positive examples of relationships (both romantic and friendly), so that you will always recognize the right kinds of relationships to pursue on your own, and be able to avoid the other kind. I will love your mom the way I want your future spouse to love you, and I will teach you to be the kind of friend you'll want to find in others.

I promise to teach you all I know of the world. I'll teach you about people, so you can seek out the good ones and deal effectively with the rest. I'll teach you how to work hard and how to manage your money, so you'll never be dependent upon someone else to guide your fate. I'll teach you about beauty, and how to find it in the simplest things and in the unlikeliest places. And I'll teach you how to find other teachers along your road, who can show you wonders I haven't even dreamed of.

Most importantly, I will love you. Always and unconditionally. This doesn't mean we won't get annoyed with one another from time to time, or argue over bedtimes, curfew, or politics. But even at the worst of moments, I will love you more than I love life itself. And when I lose my final grasp on life itself, I will be happy knowing that a bit of me (hopefully the best bit) will live on in you.

Happy first birthday, Tesla! Thank you for everything you've taught me, so far. I can't wait to see you grow into the intelligent, loving, bad-ass, wonderful woman I know you are. I love you more than you will ever know!

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It's been five months since my mom passed away. Part of me feels like it was just yesterday. Part of me feels like it's been an eternity.

While cleaning out her garage the other day, I ran across a folder in which she kept several hard-printed copies of the True Appreciation blog post I wrote about her back in 2005. I'm so glad I got a chance to make sure she knew exactly how much I appreciated her. I hope I live my life in a way that everyone I appreciate knows how much, but I doubt that's true. I get frustrated. I get distracted. I get lost in my own chaos sometimes. But when I think of my mom, I am inspired to make sure the people I love know how much better my life if because of them.

She was a giver. Everything she had (and everything she was) she gave to her children, her grandchildren, her husband, her friends and her community. She would get frustrated, angry, or hurt sometimes too. But she was always forgiving and loving above all else. People meant the world to her.

Thanks to FaceTime, she did get to see Tesla once. But she never got to meet her, never got to kiss and hug her like she was so looking forward to. And she never got to meet my brother's son Logan, or whatever little ones he and I have in our futures. She would be so happy about both of them. (Although probably a bit disappointed that Tesla still hasn't developed her mother's mono-dimple. Sorry, mom.)

I don't really know what I'm trying to say here. I guess just that I miss her. And that my world will never be the same without her in it. And, really, that my world will never BE without her in it. She is a part of me, in everything I am and everything I do.

I love you, Mom. I miss you.

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Today, we mourn the passing of a truly amazing product. After 17 years of faithful service, WebTV (later known as MSNTV) has officially shut down for good. WebTV had a huge impact on my life, both personally and professionally, so I thought I'd take a moment to talk about what I loved about WebTV, what I'll miss, and what I'll never forget.

My Introduction to WebTV

I first discovered WebTV in 1997. I had just gotten my AA, couldn't afford to go on to a four-year university, and wasn't really sure where my career was headed. So when I met a cute redhead who told me about this great customer service gig in the bay area, I called in a favor to couch-surf with a friend for a while, moved down from Sacramento, and took the plunge.

[Aimee and Tash, I will never be able to properly repay you. Thank you!]

I joined the company a few weeks before it was acquired by Microsoft, but the negative impact from that didn't really start to manifest until a year later. That first year, WebTV was the quintessential startup environment. The CS team was housed in the same ratty garage on Alma St in Palo Alto that the company had been founded in. The building was crammed with young, idealistic 20-somethings who had their eyes set on changing the world, one user at a time.

It was a magical time for me. I was surrounded by great people, most fresh out of college and aching to make a dent in the world. We started out answering phones and responding to support emails from extremely passionate users. Within a year, we had outsourced the first-level calls and everyone on the team has chosen a new area of expertise to sink their teeth into. Some began running the Previews beta testing program, some went into data analysis to spot trends and feed the data back to the product side of the business, and some transferred to other teams like Usability or Engineering.

Me? I went into training and documentation. Shortly after starting there, I had camped out in front of my TV for a week and — with just a WebTV, a Laura Lemay book, and a Geocities account — taught myself HTML. So as we began to outsource front-line CS, I built a CS Agents intranet that would let anyone from any of the three call centers get to any of a few hundred support issues (the bulk of which I helped write) within three clicks. I took Andy MacFadden's incredible "Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom" document (still the best developer-written documentation I've ever read) and distilled it down to a Lesser Scroll for advanced connections agents, wrote a IRC chat FAQ and a scad of internal documentation, and flew to call centers in Florida, Kentucky and Salt Lake City to train the next wave of customer service agents, who would be the first point of contact with our wonderful users.

I even recreated a vitrual version of the WebTV Classic, Plus and DishPlayer services, using service screenshots tied together via imagemaps, so the CS agents who didn't have a WebTV box at their desk, or had to share one, could still follow along with users while explaining how to get connected. Now that the service itself is going dark, I have posted an archival version of this for posterity.

Those were the days. We would get calls from 70 year old users who were literally crying because they were so frustrated at not understanding how email worked, or how to get into a scrapbooking chat room. With patience and a healthy supply of metaphor, we'd explain it in a way they could grok, and send them on their way. And a few months later we'd get a call from the same user, complaining that the HTML in the website they were hand-coding on Angelfire wasn't working the way the expected it to. If we ever doubted for a moment the potential for a simple user experience to empower normal people to do truly mazing things, WebTV users would quickly set us straight.

WebTV's Original Mission

The original idea behind WebTV was simple. Provide an inexpensive, easy-to-use option for normal, non-technical people to get online. "The Internet for the rest of us" wasn't just a tagline, but a mission statement. If $2,000 for a PC seemed absurd, you could drop as little as $99 on a small device that plugged into your TV and gave you access to email, bulletin boards, IRC chat, and a rudimentary web browser, with as little pain as possible, for just $20/month. Add another $70 to replace the remote control with a wireless keyboard and you were off to the races.

While younger users (like me) might quickly outgrow the system and move on to PCs, the core WebTV users turned out to be the older or less technologically inclined half of the population, who didn't want to over-complicate their lives with too much tech, but still wanted to keep in touch with their out-of-town children, share baby photos through email, and connect through bulletin boards and chat with others who loved the same things they loved. Rarely have I ever met users who were so passionate about a product as WebTV users. To many of them, WebTV was the internet. And the fact that the WebTV service has stayed alive as long as it has is a testament to their devotion.

WebTV Plus, DishPlayer and TiVo

But getting the web to run on a TV was just the start. The bigger long-term bet was on integrating the web with TV, to create a seamless hybrid of the two. WebTV Plus took the integration one step further, allowing you to plug your cable signal into the box, and providing an extremely easy to use interface for searching TV listings, keeping track of your favorites, and even tying the shows you watched to related websites.

WebTV Plus was ahead of its time. Many of the innovations it pioneered (including the ability to click through to purchase or get more info on an item directly from a TV commercial) are things that today's technologists still strive to include in the next generation of set-top boxes.

And with the DishPlayer box (essentially a WebTV Plus built into a DishNetwork satellite box), they took it one step further and included one of the first-ever digital video recorders. DishPlayer and TiVo were in development at the same time, with offices just a few blocks from one another, and launched within a few months of one another. It still kills me that the DVR race played out the way it did.

At launch, DishPlayer had all the same functionality as TiVo, a much more intuitive user interface (most people forget the initial learning curve TiVo users faced), the ability to play games like Doom and You Don't Know Jack (hey, it was the 90s, these games were pretty cool back then), and the entire internet to boot, for essentially the same price. Sadly, Microsoft really didn't understand what they had on their hands, and put almost no money into marketing DishPlayer. Meanwhile, their pluckier startup competitor with a clunkier UI, far less features, and a cute animated mascot marketed the crap out of their product, and now TiVo is a verb and hardly anyone remembers DishPlayer.

Would TiVo be a verb today if WebTV's founders had said no to Microsoft's $425 million offer and run full steam ahead the way TiVo did? And would it have taken another 10 years for set top boxes to start infiltrating the living room like they're finally starting to do now? The world will never know. But I'll always have my suspicions.

How WebTV Fell, but Refused to Die

For the first year after the acquisition, Microsoft mostly left WebTV alone. They knew they had something amazing on their hands, but didn't really understand it, so they let us continue working our way. Besides the obvious flaw of not believing in DishPlayer enough to properly fund its marketing, Microsoft started to dig its teeth into daily operations.

Emily, the CS manager we all loved and adored, left the company and was replaced by a devious, soulless shell of a human being Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned. My own manager, Steve Kroll (who I would have gone to hell and back for) finally left the company in frustration, and was replaced by an old-industry manager who literally couldn't even type, much less grok the technology industry. And the two of them proceeded to replace all the passionate, knowledgable startup staff with business types who didn't know the product and didn't care about the users. I was lucky enough to find a new startup gig and left the company the day before our group moved into Microsoft's new Silicon Valley campus. By the time Soulless and Clueless had been fired (a few months after I left), they had already cost the company at least a dozen of its best CS employees and laid waste the the team's morale.

Some of the other organizations might not have ben hit as badly as CS. And indeed, there were a few of the old WebTV crew who spent the next decade of their career quite happily at Microsoft, both moving to the Xbox and Hotmail teams (or to the Seattle mothership) and doing their best to keep the WebTV service alive and kicking for as long as possible.

After the move to the Microsoft campus, the product remained on the shelves and in active development for several more years. They rebranded it MSNTV, upgraded the browser, migrated the email to run on Hotmail servers on the back end, and even came out with a box that supported broadband. Eventually, despite continued demand for the WebTV/MSNTV service, demand for new hardware decreased to the point where they stopped selling it. Despite the lack of new hardware, the service continued to live on for many years beyond.

The fact that today's shut-down is happening 17 years after the acquisition, and 16 years after the Dark Days should stand as a testament, not only to the herculean efforts of Andrew Levin and his team, but of the incredible staying power that was built into WebTV's business right from the start.

Today, we live in a world where most "products" on the web are subsidized by the advertising companies who use them to harvest ad targeting data from their users. No matter how beloved a product is, if it ceases to be sexy or cool, or provide enough ad-targeting intel, it gets the axe. (Google Reader users, you may now rant.) But WebTV was an old-school business. They made a product that served a need, and charged a fair price for the service. This gave them product a much sturdier foundation upon which to stand.

If I recall correctly, WebTV had a base of close to a million users at its peek. This number doubtlessly dropped steadily over the years. But with the majority of the service already up and running, the service could likely be run on a skeleton crew of maybe a dozen people plus server costs. I don't have access to any internal numbers, but by napkin math, at $20 per month per user, you would only need about 10K users to cover costs. Beyond that, you'd be looking at another $2.4 million in revenue for every additional 10K users. So even at only 10% of its peek user base, you'd still be looking at a business unit that generated around $22 million per year in profit.

It's hard to kill a product that refuses to stop generating income. I sincerely wish every entrepreneur today would take this lesson to heart. (Someday I'll write a post on the history of Half.com. It's a very different product from WebTV, but the lesson is identical.)

WebScissors and the Legacy of Jos

I made a lot of friend in my time at WebTV. Easily the friendliest and most prolifically talented of them was Jos Claerbout. He was one of those guys who just radiated friendliness. You couldn't meet him and not instantly adore him. And his brain simply wouldn't stop producing. He thought objecting oriented programming should be easier to learn, so he wrote the funniest, most useful object oriented programming tutorial I've ever seen: Don't Fear the OOP: Why coding Java is just like writing a trashy Western novel. He saw users having trouble making their own websites? He built his own tool, WebScissors, to make it easy for them to import images to their WebTV scrapbooks.

Sadly, he shared so much of his heart with the rest of the world that it gave out on him far too soon. Jos's death had a huge impact on everyone who knew him. His father, Jon, put together a beautiful site on The Life of Jos Claerbout that crystalizes many of our thoughts and memories of him.

Before he died, I had been talking to Jos about working with him to upgrade the user interface for WebScissors, and add the ability to view HTML source code. So I was deeply honored when Jon and Andrew Levin (who was maintaining the site on Jon's behalf) invited me to help maintain WebScissors for posterity, and add the features Jos and I wanted to bring to our users. To this day, WebScissors 2.0 is alive and well, and we have no intention of letting it go any time soon. It will outlive the WebTV service itself, as a testament to Jos's creativity and dedication to his users.

And it may even continue to be useful, as today's tablet users often face similar browser limitations to those that WebScissors necessary in the first place, all those years ago. Time will tell...

The Legacy of WebTV

WebTV was an amazing product that was far ahead of its time. It taught me the importance of usability, and how a simple interface and a few visual/textual metaphors could bridge the gap to make complex technology accessible to the masses. It taught me the importance of community, and how deeply users will love your product if you fight like hell to make it serve their passions. And it gave me the curiosity, inspiration and opportunity to start a career that still gets me excited to this day.

But the true legacy of WebTV is its people. WebTV alumni have gone on to play key roles in creating some of the most ubiquitous technology on the market today. I've lost count of the number of WebTV alumni who have worked behind the scenes at Apple to continue the mission to bring the internet to the rest of us. Andy Rubin, Andy MacFadden and their team are behind the Android smartphones that appeal so well to the masses. And quite a few of alumni have remained with Microsoft, contributing to the Xbox platform and other products within the company.

And let's not forget the users. Never, ever forget the users.

As WebTV fades to #191919,* I will always cherish the people it introduced me to, and the lessons it taught me.

* WebTV Trivia:

It can be really hard on the eyes to read contrasting text on a true-black background. Especially on a low-resolution TV screen.

So all of the "black" screens in the WebTV service actually used the shade #191919 instead of true black for the background color.

I started by scouring YouTube for instructional videos from people who had already built their own. Rifraf's design was my starting point. I loved the way he did the walls, but the top was a bit bulkier and the base less symetric than I preferred. So I melded it with a roof design from another video (which I can't find anymore) and tweaked it so that it would work with a solid core, to keep the wall pieces more stable and well aligned.

Of course, ordering parts from BrickLink can be expensive for small logs (mainly due to international shipping from multiple suppliers), so there are significant economies to scale from building more than one at a time. So I built a whole fleet of TARDISs, giving some away as gifts and making the rest available as kits for those who want to build their own, without having to go through the parts-sourcing hassle.

Build Your Own Lego TARDIS
If you'd like to build your own Lego TARDIS (or assemble one you got from me), I have put the Lego TARDIS instructions on Flickr. If you don't want to scour BrickLink for all the parts, you can buy the kit on eBay.

For those who want to experience a media event from a particular person's perspective, live-tweeting can be great. A fan of a TV show might enjoy reading along with the reactions of an actor from the show, a media personality they like, or even one of their friends. But unless steps are taken to manage one's message, live-tweeting can also be one of the worst violations of Wheaton's Law in social media, pissing off all of your followers who don't like spoilers. The good news is that this is a fairly easy problem to fix, simply by using a parallel feed for live-tweeting events.

Why is live-tweeting such a bad idea?

Quite simply, unless your Twitter feed is specifically set up for live-tweeting, the odds are quite high that the majority of people who follow you do not want to read your live tweets. For anyone who is interested in the event you're covering but hasn't had a chance to watch it yet (either because it hasn't aired yet in their time zone, country, or online distribution platform, or because they simply don't have the time to schedule their life around live events), your need to live-tweet contradicts their desire to experience it fresh and spoiler-free when they do watch it. And for those who aren't interested in the event at all, your live-tweets essentially hijack your followers' feeds with irrelevant noise, which again translates to a bad experience for them.

As an example, let's look at Syfy's live-tweets of Warehouse 13. As part of the marketing for the new season, Syfy had the characters from the show live-tweeting several episodes. Given that the network has dozens of shows and even more movies on their channel (and many of their followers are drawn to their Twitter feed for Craig Engler's great "how the business really works" tweets), we can safely assume that it is a relatively small subset of their total followers that are fans of any given show. Let's be generous and call it 25%.

Let's further assume that, with an international following, a relatively small percentage will have the opportunity (much less have the time) to watch the show when it airs live in the same time zone as the live-tweet. Some will watch a few hours later when it airs in their time zone, some will watch the next day when it airs online, and some will watch a week or more later when their personal schedule allows. Let's again be very generous and assume that 20% of the fans watch live. Thus, 5% of the total users would be both fans of a given show and watching it live.

That would mean that 75% of the Syfy Twitter feed's followers will be annoyed at the flood of tweets that are irrelevant to them, 20% will be seriously pissed off at having the show they love spoiled for them before they've had a chance to watch it, and only 5% will be happy to have been able to properly enjoy the live-tweet experience. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that providing a negative experience for 95% of your followers in order to provide a positive experience for only 5% is a bad move.

But what if I give advanced notice to mute/unfollow me before I start?

Typically, when the recently-spoiled masses chew out the live-tweeter for spoiling things for them, the live-tweeter's response is to point out that they did make a warning tweet before they started. Something like "we're going to be live-tweeting for the next hour, so if you don't want to be spoiled stay off Twitter or un-follow us for a while." Setting aside the inherent presumptuousness of saying, essentially "I'm going to do something I know is bad, so it's your responsibility to avoid it," this kind of warning tweet simply doesn't work.

Twitter is, after all, reverse-linear. Unless they spend the whole day constantly refreshing Twitter (yes, I know some do, but they're the minority, particularly outside desk job hours), people experience your Twitter feed in reverse order. So if you spend an hour live-tweeting a show they love, they won't see your warning tweet until after they've had to wade through an hour's worth of crap, and already had the joy sucked out of their viewing experience. And they can't simply skip your tweets, as they have to sift through them in order to see all the other tweets in their timeline that are interspersed with yours.

Live-tweeting on a non-dedicated Twitter feed is simply a bad thing to do. Please, please don't do it.

Ok, but some people LOVE live-tweeting. How do we make it work for them?

It is absolutely true that some people love live-tweeting. Some tweeters love doing it, and some followers love reading it. That's great! If everyone involved is enjoying it, more power to them. The trick is simply making your live-tweets opt-in rather than opt-out by doing them on a separate Twitter feed.

Let's return to the Syfy example. Instead of using the main @syfy feed to host live-tweet events, Syfy could create a separate @syfy_live feed. Whenever they want to host a live-tweet event, they could then use the main feed to let people know that they can follow the secondary feed to play along with the event. That way, anyone who wants to see the live-tweet content can easily follow the live feed and bask in the instant gratification, while anyone who doesn't want to be spoiled (or simply doesn't care to have their feed flooded) doesn't have to be inconvenienced.

This setup also has the benefit of allowing Syfy to better judge how many people are actively engaged with the live-tweet events, as they can watch the follower count for the live feed go up and down with each event, rather than having to guess what portion of the main feed's changes (positive or negative) are related to the live-tweeting. Using separate feeds for live events really is better for everyone involved.

Craig, on the off chance that you're reading this, please let me know when you decide to implement something like this. I love almost everything you do with the Syfy account, particularly the "how the industry works" educational tweets. I was very sad to have to unfollow to avoid the flood of spoilers, and I would really love to be able to follow again.

But can't people still be spoiled when the live-tweet feed gets re-tweeted?

Yes, of course. But if that happens, the sin that is committed is by the retweeter, not by you, and unless they retweeting you en masse, it's going to be a far, far smaller problem than live-tweeting on your main feed. We can't solve the problem universally without Twitter building filtering tools into their product (which, as an advertising company, they have little incentive to do). But we can at least minimize the problem as much as possible by putting some thought into how we use our primary Twitter feeds and when we move special content to secondary feeds.

Hmm. Wouldn't this work for other high-volume live events, too, like sporting events?

If we could convince sports fans to have separate feeds for their game-day tweets, that would be utterly fantastic! Seriously, I might cry from the pure joy of it. But there the number of sports fans who annoy their followers with this undecipherable (to the rest of us) gibrish is far larger than the number of people who live-tweet TV shows and other live media events, so I figure it's best to start with an easily solvable problem, and work our way up to the more daunting problems.

Besides, when was the last time you tried to get a sports fan to listen to logic regarding how they consume their sports? Especially while they're watching the game? Up. Hill. Battle. :-)

I wrote this in 2011 when Netflix announced that they would be renaming their DVD service to "Qwikster" and separating it completely from the existing Netflix site. I wasn't actively blogging at the time, but I ran across this again and liked what I had written, so I've back-posted it here.

Core Focus – What problem are we trying to solve?

It has been said that if Union Pacific realized they were in the transportation business rather than just the railroad business, we would today be flying on Union Pacific Airlines. Rather than maintaining a strategic vision of the problem their company existed to solve (getting people and goods from point A to point B), they focused too closely on one particular solution to that problem (railroads) and were thus unprepared to respond when changing business climate made their chosen solution less and less relevant.

More recently, we saw Blockbuster repeat the same mistake. They incorrectly believed that their success was based on running an efficient DVD rental business, when in fact it was based on solving the problem of convenient access to high quality video entertainment. As improving technology made new methods of content distribution possible, they clung to their existing brick-and-mortar solution for far too long. And by the time they did try to explore other options, their years of inaction had given their competitors too much of a head start for them to stand a chance of catching up.

In order to understand the path forward for Netflix, we must first understand their core competence. As a consumer brand, the best way to do that is to ask not what products or services Netflix provides, but what problem they solve for their users. What need does Netflix fulfill that makes people love them as much as they do?

I would argue that Netflix's value to their customers is the same one that they wrestled away from Blockbuster: delivering convenient access to high quality video entertainment. If we keep this fundamental goal in mind, and focus our tactical decisions on achieving this goal, the rest of the questions become much simpler.

Brand Integrity – What's in a name?

Naming a company or product is easy. Building a brand is very difficult. Yes, you have to give your company/product/service a name. But more than that, you have to make that name mean something. Not a literal meaning, but an emotional meaning.

A brand name with a literal meaning can be useful in explaining the potential value to the first wave of customers. But as a brand evolves over time, the literal meaning is quickly replaced by what the brand means to its customers. And that meaning is defined almost entirely on how the brand makes people feel, based on their (and their community's) interaction with it.

When you consistently solve users' problems and make their lives easier, your brand will come to mean something special to them. "Netflix means entertaining the whole family without spending a fortune." "Netflix means dinner and a movie without having to go brave the weather." "Netflix means independence from an oppressive $50-80/month cable bill." "Netflix means never running out of new movies to keep my kids entertained and happy." These are the kinds of meanings Netflix users have blessed the brand with over the years.

When you have a brand this strong, introducing a new brand can be very risky. If the new product or service solves a different problem (like eBay vs PayPal, or the myriad of P&G brands), multiple brands that are expected to mean different things to different people certainly make sense. But if the new product or service simply solves a slightly different subset of the same problem (like Google's many search-related sub-brands), it usually makes more sense to keep the existing brand (and all the good will that comes with it) and differentiate the new functionality in context.

This risk only increases when the new brand is being applied to the product or service with which the users originally fell in love. Changing the name implies that the company no longer has faith in the re-named portion, and that it may no longer retain the qualities that defined its brand to begin with. It introduces friction, confusion and fear. It makes people worry. "Do they dislike this product enough that they want to take their name off the label?" "Are they just planning to sell it off to someone who's going to ruin it?" "Does the brand name even mean what I thought it did anymore?" Obviously, not questions one would ever want people to ask about a brand.

To determine whether a new brand or a sub-brand makes more sense, we must return to the original question of what problem you are solving for the users. If Netflix means convenient access to high quality video entertainment, instant vs mail order, movies vs TV vs games, and physical media formats are all just variations on that original problem and should therefore be represented as sub-brands.

Netflix Instant means instant access to (a somewhat limited selection of) great content in an instant.Netflix [_____] means access to an endless library of content, delivered to your door in just a few days.Netflix Games * means being able to play any game you want, for as long as you want.

Netflix still means everything it has ever meant. The sub-brands just help you tell a more tailored story to different types of users.

* Though Netflix does not currently deal in games, I include it here both in anticipation of that someday happening and to help illustrate these suggestions more abstractly than just to the two current services.

Convenience Is King - Streamlining User Experience by Platform and Preference

While the Qwikster re-branding has gotten a lot of press, the more passionate complaints across the blogosphere have been of a much more practical nature. Yes, the essence of what Netflix means has a great emotional impact. But the loss of convenience from having to go to multiple websites to do what they can now do in just one place has a much more pragmatic impact on people's lives.

To determine the best course of action, we must again return to the question of what problem Netflix is there to solve. If the goal is to delivering convenient access to high quality video entertainment, convenience is a vital part of the equation. This means getting them from interest to immersion as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

If you look at the path people take to get to the Play button, a few distinct experiences emerge. Users who don't yet know what they want to watch need a way to browse what's available, seeing recommendations and details about different titles that may increase their interest. Once they find something they like, they need a way to express interest in the title – this could be clicking a Play button, adding it to a queue, rating it, or marking it as something they already own. When they decide they're ready to start watching, they need a way to select a title – either from a browse page, queue or other entry point. Finally, when they have finished watching a title, they need a way to choose what's next.

How they navigate between these stages – and what content/functionality they are presented with – can be customized based on what we know about them. First, we know what platform they are on: are they accessing Netflix through a desktop browser, smartphone, tablet, set-top box, or gaming console? Second, we know which services they are currently subscribed to. Finally, we might know a bit about their personal preferences from past behavior.

Given this, it comes relatively straight forward to extrapolate how to guide the user through the process.

One entry point per platform
For those accessing Netflix on a web browser, there should only be one website. For those accessing Netflix on their smartphone, tablet, set-top box or gaming console, there should only be one app per platform (and be as similar between apps for the same platform type as possible).

Browsing vs Selection
Once in the system, users should be given the option of either browsing (and/or searching) the total collection of what is available to them or seeing a list of the titles that they have previously expressed interest in.

Streamlined Browsing (Requires BU Collaboration)
When the user doesn't know yet what they want to watch or play, they also won't know which format it's available in. So browsing can easily be separated between TV/movies and games, but within each top-level category should allow browsing by intuitive filters such as genre, recommendations and past behavior, as most of Netflix's browse interfaces currently do. This is the portion that will require the most collaboration between business units, as the Instant and DVD groups must agree on that format in which the basic title info is presented, and then provide separate call-to-action hooks for each of the services that title is available for (Instant, DVD, Blu-Ray, teaser to look at the tie-in game, etc). But any extra coordination between business units will inherently pay off with a much more streamlined user experience.

Streamlined Selection (Allows BU Experimentation)
Within the selection branch, it will likely make sense to have separate selection screens based on the specific services that a given user subscribes to. This can allow the various business units to have a fairly wide berth of innovation around how best to display their own content. The Instant team may choose to go with a tiled box art view with category links for narrowing large queues by mood (or who marked it, for family accounts, eventually). The DVD team may choose to reuse the mood/user filtering sidebar, but present the results in a priority-ordered text view. And the Games team may choose to use the same priority-order view as DVDs, but use a sidebar that allows filtering by platform, genre and game rating. Further customizations can be made based on platform (browser, tablet, console) and interface (mouse, touch, remote), to make it as easy as possible for a user on any given platform to quickly and easily find something great to watch/play.

Summary

People love Netflix. If they didn't, they wouldn't be reacting this passionately to recent changes.

Netflix means convenient access to high quality video entertainment. As long as a new service still addresses this core mission, it should retain the core brand (or a sub-brand thereof).

Convenience is king. While there are certainly logistical changes that can be made to both the user interface and back end processes, convenience to the user should always take precedence over the convenience of various business units.

As some of you know, I've been working with Eliza Dushku on a charity auction. She's cleaning out her closet after a wardrobe makeover, and trying to raise money to benefit Camp Hale, the non-profit summer camp her family is involved with.

This is for all you teachers, librarians, parents and education-watchers:

This Tuesday we're going to be launching our new Edutopia Groups community, as a place for educators to gather and discuss "what works in public education." We have invited some great educators to facilitate the groups for us, and we're really excited to watch the groups will up with insightful conversations.

Today we're inviting in our existing members and friends & family for a sneak peek. If you're interested in how to fix our education system, please come on in and join the conversation! And if you know someone else who'd be interested, feel free to invite them in.

Any gamers out there want to test the latest cutting-edge gaming hardware? OnLive beta testing is about to begin and they're recruiting testers.

What is OnLive, you ask? Cloud gaming. All you need is a browser plugin or a mini-console, your own controller, keyboard or mouse, and you have on-demand access to a huge library of games. OnLive sends the signals from your controller over the web back to their custom-built gaming servers, it plays the game there (with more processing power than you'd ever have at home), and sends you back a video stream of what's going on in-game.

Plus, since they're bending video streams like crazy, they let you eaves drop and watch other people playing their games - live. Want to check out that new Star Wars: The Force Unleashed game, but don't know anyone who owns it? Just click into the game and pick from dozens of people who are playing it to watch over their shoulder. Or, while you're playing, click a button to record "brag clips" to post on your blog or twitter feed.

"But wait!" you say. "It'll never work! It would take years to develop the tech to get video streaming to the point where you could push that much video over the web seamlessly." And you'd be right. It'd take about seven years, actually. Luckily, Steve Perlman (of WebTV fame) has always been about a decade ahead of the curve. He and his crew have been working on this since 2002 and are finally ready to lift the veil this winter. Should be exciting!

Lets just hope he doesn't sell this company to Microsoft like he did WebTV. Apple, TiVo and YouTube are still struggling to catch up with Perlman's business plan from a decade ago, that Microsoft didn't understand and let fall by the wayside. I'll still never forgive them for the epic marketing fumble that lead to Dishplayer's obscurity and TiVo's ubiquity.

Last night I saw the best Star Trek movie in the series at the best theatre on the planet with the most amazing woman I've ever met, thanks to the best job I've ever had (so far).

Star Trek was nearly perfect! I couldn't imagine how they could possibly pull off a series relaunch without pissing off the hard core fans, alienating the newcomers, or both. But, as the 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes indicates, they did it brilliantly!

Do not wait for the DVD, folks. Or even second weekend. This is one to see opening night, in a theatre full of excited fans. You will not regret it.

More specifically, I'll be the product manager for the upcoming redesign of the Edutopia.org website, which is part of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. It's going to be a pretty challenging project, but a hell of a fun ride! At least for the one year length of the contract. But by then it will hopefully lead to something else for the longer term.

And I'll be working at Big Rock Ranch (see below), which is right next door to Skywalker Ranch (where the cafeteria is). It's going to be an hour and a half commute each way, but I think you'll agree it'll be well worth it.

On the down side, that means I have five days to get as much of my moving done as possible before I lose my life to work for the next few months. Zoooom!

It's a strange feeling, being aware of your place in your own story. Your life, played out like a TV series, chapters broken into seasons, one feeding into the next. And the moment of anticipation between the seasons...

Last season was an interesting one. Google, eBay, Solace, loss, maddening growing pains, and that wonderful True Love bit right before the big layoff / family drama finale. Brilliant!

And here I am in the moment between seasons. Rewatching old episodes to squeeze the maximum possible meaning from what has come before. Projecting forward to see what it will mean for the next season. Paying attention to the little hints and teasers, pointing to the exciting things to come. So many new adventures. So much drama - of a very different kind.

It feels like the season premiere is coming fast. I just hope I can get all the set pieces in place in time. It's going to be one hell of a ride!